Diao, 72, was born in Chengdu, China, but moved to New York City at a very young age. He attended Kenyon College in Ohio and studied philosophy, but soon found the academic world just wasn’t for him. Instead of class, Diao spent most of his time in Ohio working at a printing shop. It was there where he fell in love with art. Diao’s took his passion for arts back to New York, where he landed a part-time job at the Samuel Kootz Gallery hanging paintings and sweeping the floors. From there, a friend who was working at the Guggenheim Museum referred Diao to pick a few odd jobs at the Guggenheim. It was there that he would work on his idol Barnett Newman’s exhibition, The Stations of the Cross.
Diao frequently ran into Newman while working as a bartender at Max’s Kansas City, a Park Avenue South bar known as the unofficial graduate school for New York artists.
"I had frequent encounters with Barney (Newman) but I was too shy to engage in any type of conversation," Diaosaid.
Diao would go on to become one of the most underrated contemporary artists of his time. Like Newman, Diao has a limited number of solo exhibitions on his resume. And like Newman, Diao was never really understood by art critics. He was a rebel with a cause, in a satirical way.
Whether he’s creating painting about the career of his idol Barnet Newman, or about the 30-year hiatus from his motherland, Diao at the age of 72 continues to be - if nothing else - a man of deep thoughts and understanding on the subject of art.
Carrying forth those who came before him never became more evident than the time he returned to China in 1979 after a 30-year hiatus.
"I came back to visit my mother and family. I knew so little about my mother and her side of the family. When I did come I heard a lot stories and factual information about her father, her side of the family. Unlike my fathers side of the family, which was very westward looking, my mother’s side of the family was very traditional," he said.
Walk through the large space at UCCA and pass Diao's large-scale paintings and you will find yourself at the end of his exhibition, the final room. This room is dedicated to works inspired by his return to China.
When talking with Diao, you notice right away that he is a New Yorker at heart. But everyone is from somewhere. And for Diao, that somewhere is China. Being an artist in New York during the early 1970s was no easy task. But being a Chinese-American artist made it nearly impossible.
As seen in one of his works, What Ever Happened To Hedda Sterne? (1993), Diao felt gratitude towards Sterne, an Romanian painter who was in the circle of first generation New York contemporary artists but never received much attention. Many say Sterne was left out because she was a woman in a male- dominated industry. Diao was in the circle of second-generation New York contemporary artists but like Sterne, didn’t receive much attention from the big galleries. While he admits that his Chinese-American identity might have had something to do with it, he says he never used that as a direct excuse.
Diao is in the final stretch of his career. At 72 years old, the exhibition at UCCA, which features over 100 of his works, can be signified as his induction to the art hall-of-fame.
More than any other contemporary artist, Diao is contemporary in a classical way, or maybe vice versa. If there were a written legacy to Diao’s career, it would be that he did things his way. He didn’t try to be someone he isn’t. He didn’t choose influences based on the trends of contemporary art. He saw what he saw. He liked what he liked. He did what he did.
Diao recalls seeing Jackson Pollock at Max’s Kansas City bar, getting into drunken fights when he was frustrated with how he was being perceived. While Diao thought about following suit, it finally settled in that he isn’t Jackson Pollock.
"I thought about taking the Pollock approach but decided it wasn’t the correct thing to do," says Diao.
David Diao did it his way.
Diao sat down with China Daily for an exclusive interview during his exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone.
Diao sat down with China Daily for an exclusive interview during his exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone.As an artist, how do you feel about how your work is perceived?
I just don’t think there’s a complete congruence between making the painting and the reception. I don’t think there is ever necessarily the ideal response. It’s more like casting bread over the waters and waiting on different ripple effects to come back to you, all in the hopes of learning something new. I guess I don’t really care what they think; I’m more interested in what I can get from it all.
When you are in the process of painting, whom are you painting for?
"I think the first viewer is myself. Not a fixed version of myself. It’s always one that might contain a previous version, but in the hopes of going to the next version."
It’s never really about how I see myself perceived. I don’t even do anything until an idea is strong enough that it gets me out of bed. Mainly the work comes out of some notion of the question ‘what if’. What if, what if anything. What if that condition might take place? How might you image something? Or, how might you begin to constitute something?
Let’s talk about the Newman series, who are you painting it for?
Initially I painted it because I was surprised about the statistics on the number of his production. Normally, one thinks of somebody that is considered as major as Newman to be very productive when in fact he made so few works. That surprised me but also made me happy about the whole project because if he made more works it would be harder to image. Also, I was playing kind of a joke, and the joke was directed to the outside world. You need the audience to laugh at your joke. It’s not just for myself but also about the joke of seeing the painting as a wall text.
If someone perceives you as the artist carrying on Newman’s legacy, how does that make you feel
That would make me feel fine. Long ago, I realized that I’m very different from your typical avant-guard artist, beginning with the idea that you begin at degree zero; you kill all the past, with a complete new start. Certainly (Kazimir) Malevich talked that way and Newman himself talked that way, but I’m very aware of what I do as carrying forth on the shoulders of those who came before.
Do you think as a Chinese-American you struggled with being acknowledged
Probably, yes. I don’t dwell on it. I’m aware of this but I didn’t militantly work against it. I didn’t go protesting it. Life is unfair. You’re born, you live and you die. Life is never fair. I mean, I oscillate between thinking the world owes me everything and that the world owes me nothing. The idea is I try to do what I do within the work. When I’m jealous of somebody I reveal it in the work. It’s a crapshoot. That’s how I feel about this show. I can’t believe I’m having this show. It came out of nowhere. I have to thank Phil Tinari (UCCA director). He came up with the idea of doing this show. I seek to be positively viewed, but I also seek to be critically viewed. That’s how I learn something. If people are only patting you on the back, you don’t get very far. It might be fun initially but it’s kind of running in place.
Do you see yourself as a role model for young Chinese-American artists
Oh, god forbid, no. You are really disarming me when you say that. It just never occurred to me that I am or that I would want to be. And it’s certainly not a title that I seek. I’m pretty emphatic by the ground of which I am from, and that is New York. My work is always about the specific and the particular, going away from the universal.
The David Diao exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts in Beijing runs from through Nov 15.
